Blogging is hard

As the title says: Blogging is hard. At least for me. I’m used to consume stuff on the internet, getting myself to write about stuff that actually interests someone is not easy. But why? I guess it’s the process of writing things down.

The problem

Most of the time when I’m developing something I think to myself: “Write a blog post about this!”. Then there are the things to do:

1. Get a neutral example for the thing you want to blog about.
   Most of the time the code you are working on is project specific although the real problem you want to blog about is not (otherwise, why blog about it in the first case?). So you have to come up with a generic example for your problem, which takes time.
2. Get the code in a form that your readers can work with it.
   Although there are people who advocate posting code as images (as to avoid problems with Copy&Paste code) I like to provide the code in my posts as gists. This takes time and I have not yet developed a workflow that makes this fast and easy for me.
3. Actually write the blog post.
   Coming up with the content, wording etc. takes time. I blog primarily for myself yet if no one can pull anything from my posts, the post is essentially worthless (which in fact my be true for this very post).

So, what to do about this?

Blog more. Develop a workflow for blogging. Get used to it. In the end it benefits me. It makes me think about the problem at hand, forcing my to come up with a more generic way to present it, seeing it from a slightly different angle.

And even small blog posts like this one (without too much content ;-) benefit me by familiarising me with Markdown syntax and just plain old writing.